English

Size-Separable Tile Self-Assembly: A Tight Bound for Temperature-1 Mismatch-Free Systems

Computational Geometry 2014-04-30 v1 Emerging Technologies

Abstract

We introduce a new property of tile self-assembly systems that we call size-separability. A system is size-separable if every terminal assembly is a constant factor larger than any intermediate assembly. Size-separability is motivated by the practical problem of filtering completed assemblies from a variety of incomplete "garbage" assemblies using gel electrophoresis or other mass-based filtering techniques. Here we prove that any system without cooperative bonding assembling a unique mismatch-free terminal assembly can be used to construct a size-separable system uniquely assembling the same shape. The proof achieves optimal scale factor and temperature for the size-separable system. As part of the proof, we obtain two results of independent interest on mismatch-free temperature-1 two-handed systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1404.7410,
  title  = {Size-Separable Tile Self-Assembly: A Tight Bound for Temperature-1 Mismatch-Free Systems},
  author = {Andrew Winslow},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1404.7410},
  year   = {2014}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T04:01:59.399Z